LABELED, TYPED LINKS AS CUES WHEN READING HYPERTEXT DOCUMENTS

This article examines the classification of link types within hypertex t databases. Do labeled links act as cues, enabling understanding of t he structure and leading to more informed navigational choices? Althou gh there is anecdotal evidence that indicating link types to readers i s useful in hypertext systems, there is little experimental data to su pport this position. This study tries to provide an experimental basis for the development of labels identifying link types. It addresses wh ether labeling the different types of links affects hypertext searchin g by providing or enhancing a structure for readers of nonlinear texts . An experiment was run to determine which of the following three cond itions serve users with better cues and lead to increased performance in both browsing and querying scenarios: 1) Providing only organizatio nal links; 2) Adding unlabeled semantic, rhetorical, and pragmatic lin ks in addition to the organizational links; and 3) Adding labeled sema ntic, rhetorical, and pragmatic links to the organizational links. The experiment used a between subjects design where subjects were library science students. SuperBook was used as the hypertext platform and th e OCLC Cataloguing Users' Guide was used as the hypertext document. Th e statistical results indicate that there was no significant differenc e between the three conditions in the browsing task. However, subjects who had labeled content-based links performed significantly better on the querying task.